‘EDITING IDENTITY’: THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING ‘FOREIGN’ IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S ‘INTERPRETER OF MALADIES’ AND NIEL BISSOONDATH'S ‘DIGGING UP THE MOUNTAINS’ (Pages 112-129) by Dr. Aditi Vahia in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

While discussing the issue of cultural identity, Stuart Hall, in ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ states ,”… instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think … of identity as a ‘production’ which never complete, always in process and constituted within, not outside representation” (110). Considering this, identity is an issue of ‘becoming’ and not ‘being’. While this fact can be generalized for the entire human race, it becomes an essentiality in case of the immigrant community across the globe. These are the people “in diaspora”, as reflected by Makarand Paranjpe in his In Diaspora. They represent a amalgamation of six features i.e. ‘dispersal’, ‘collective memory’, ‘alienation’, ‘respect and longing for the homeland’, ’a belief in restoration’, and finally ‘self-definition in terms of the present homeland’. What emerges then is the ‘total self’ – influenced by all these features. Above all, there is this desperate need of wanting to be accepted by the mainstream society. Thus the issue of identity for a person of diaspora remains problematic and always contested. Digging Up the Mountains by Neil Bissoondath, and Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri are collections of short stories where these writers analyze the perennial process of placing themselves amidst their respective mainstream societies. Having grown up in the two worlds, Canadian and American respectively, the issue of identity is a complex one as they have undergone a process of being culturally uprooted and ‘re rooted’. This paper, then is an attempt to analyze their interpretation of this so called process of ‘editing the identity’ with a detailed discussion of the short fiction. Key Words: Indian Diaspora, immigrant community, political upheaval, post-colonial societies, inhibitions etc.